I am a novice designer/programmer. I need to implement a feature similar to this in my project.

Can someone tell me what exactly is going on in the background? Can anyone explain in detail? Are these real images? I mean, are these images photographed or just made up in an image editor? How should i set a generic framework for this feature? More the details, more helpful it would be.

I started learning jQuery a few days back. I know some basic JavaScript but not at an advanced level. Now, is it possible to learn Ajax with jQuery alone or should i have more thorough knowledge in javascript?